AS12709 MELITACABLE

A cable operator holding a whole /16 for an island, with the old brand still answering in reverse DNS.

What it's used for

• Cable broadband and telecoms in Malta. 289,792 addresses in 31 IPv4 prefixes, 23 IPv6 prefixes, and 26 observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• The largest block is 94.17.0.0/16, netname MT-MELITACABLE-20080620, 65,536 addresses in one announcement.
• Dated netnames run from MT-MELITACABLE-20010515 through to 20110620.
• The IPv6 prefixes out of 2a01:180 form a doubling sequence: /42, /43, /44, then two /48s, a /47, /46, /45 and /41.
• Nine sampled addresses answered, under two different domains: melita.com and onvol.net.
• The names carry a second field: c191-254.i13-48.melita.com, c63-255.i08-25.onvol.net.

Interesting

• The c label is the address, the i label is not. It changes independently of the address and stays constant across whole ranges, which is what a headend or access-node identifier looks like. Cable networks are built as trees of shared coaxial segments, and that second field says which branch of the tree an address hangs from.
• Both domains resolve for addresses in the same network. onvol.net is a brand that predates the current one, and rather than renumber the reverse zones somebody left both templates in place, so the merger history is legible from any traceroute.
• 289,792 addresses is an enormous holding for a country of Malta's size, and it comes from being the incumbent cable operator on an island where one physical network reaches nearly every household. Address count tracks the reach of the wire, not the size of the company.